What Unit 2 assesses

Unit 2 carries all of AO1 — 20% of the whole GCSE. In controlled assessment, you are assessed in three tasks: an individual presentation and interaction, a discussion and a role play.

AO1 asks you to:

• speak to communicate clearly and purposefully; structure and sustain talk, adapting it to different situations and audiences; use standard English and a variety of techniques as appropriate;
• listen and respond to speakers ideas and perspectives, and how they present meaning;
• interact with others, shaping meanings through suggestions, comments and questions and drawing ideas together;
• create and sustain different roles.

The level of control: you plan under limited supervision, but the tasks for final assessment are completed under formal supervision, and your teacher must be able to authenticate the work as yours.

The individual presentation and interaction

You present information and ideas, and then handle questions. The learning outcomes ask you to communicate clearly and effectively, structure and sustain talk, choose and adapt language appropriate to an audience, and respond appropriately to questions and views of others.

• Open with something concrete. A moment, a number, an object in your hand — never my presentation is about.
• Give the talk a spine. Three sections is plenty. Signpost the turns out loud.
• Prepare for the interaction. The questions afterwards are assessed too. Write down the three hardest questions you could be asked and answer them in advance.
• Adapt to your audience. Explaining a technical hobby to a class means defining terms without patronising anyone.

Notes, not scripts. A speaker reading a script cannot adapt to the room — and adapting to the room is precisely what is being marked.

Structuring the presentation

The discussion

In the discussion you must interact with others, make a range of effective contributions, express ideas clearly, accurately and appropriately, listen and respond to others ideas and perspectives, and challenge what you hear where appropriate — shaping meaning through asking questions and making comments and suggestions.

• Quantity is not quality. Talking most is not scoring most. A single question that unlocks the group is worth more than four repeated opinions.
• Build on people by name. Picking up what Niamh said about cost — does that still hold if the council pays?
• Challenge respectfully. Disagreement is explicitly rewarded when it is reasoned: challenge the idea, not the person.
• Draw ideas together. Summarising where the group has got to is one of the highest-value moves available.
• Bring in the quiet one. Ryan, you looked unconvinced — what would change your mind? That is shaping meaning through questions.

The most valuable contribution

The role play

The role play asks you to create and sustain different roles from a range of real-life contexts and to experiment with language to engage the audience.

• Real-life contexts means an interview, a complaint, a negotiation, a public meeting, a witness account — not fantasy.
• Build the voice from choices, not an accent. A role is made of vocabulary, register, sentence length and what the character will and will not say.
• Sustain it. Slipping out of role halfway is the commonest way to lose marks here.
• Give the role something to want. A character with a goal listens, adapts and pushes — which produces exactly the language the criteria reward.

Standard English: AO1 says use standard English as appropriate. In role, a character might use non-standard forms deliberately — and that is a language choice you can justify. The word doing the work is appropriate.

Which task is this skill for?

Tap a skill, then tap the task it belongs to.

The three criteria strands

CCEA marks each Unit 2 task against three strands. Knowing them tells you exactly where to aim.

• Communicating and adapting language — clarity, structure, register, standard English, and adjusting to the audience in front of you.
• Interacting and responding — listening, building, questioning, challenging, drawing ideas together.
• Creating and sustaining roles — inhabiting a voice and holding it.

Why students plateau: they prepare content and neglect interaction. Two of the three strands are about what you do with other people — which cannot be scripted, only practised.

Move to the skill it proves

Tap a spoken move on the left, then tap the skill it demonstrates.

What is being moderated?

How to prepare for a spoken assessment

Speaking is a skill, which means it is trainable. These four habits raise marks reliably.

• Rehearse aloud, not in your head. Silent rehearsal hides the sentences you cannot actually say.
• Record once and listen back. Fillers, flat patches and rushing are obvious on playback and invisible from inside.
• Slow down about ten per cent. Nerves speed everyone up; clarity is a marked criterion.
• Prepare questions, not just answers. For the discussion, arrive with three good open questions. They will earn you more than any prepared speech.

Body and voice: stand still, look up, and finish your sentences. The three most common causes of an unfairly low mark are mumbling, gabbling and staring at the page.

Standard English

Running a discussion that scores

A discussion is assessed on what you do with other people. Four moves carry most of the marks.

• Open it up: ask a question that has more than one defensible answer.
• Build: take someone else point and add the next step to it, naming them.
• Test: challenge an assumption politely — that only works if...
• Gather: summarise the state of the argument so the group can move on.

The silence trap: if you have said nothing for two minutes, you cannot be credited. If you have said everything for two minutes, you have stopped the others from being credited — and the criteria notice both.

Sustaining a role

A checklist for the assessed tasks

Before each assessed task, run this list.

• Purpose: can I say in one sentence what this talk is for?
• Audience: who is listening, and what do they already know?
• Structure: do I have three sections and a planned ending?
• Interaction: what are the three hardest questions, and what is my answer to each?
• Delivery: am I looking up, slowing down, and finishing my sentences?

Remember: preparation happens under limited supervision, but the assessed task itself is under formal supervision — so everything you need has to be in your head and your plan, not in a script.

The big ideas to know

You have now covered all three Unit 2 tasks and what the assessment criteria reward. Press Finish to see your score.